Shane Conway an injury doubt for Kerry’s Joe McDonagh Cup campaign

KERRY senior hurling manager Stephen Molumphy has confirmed that star player Shane Conway is a serious doubt the Kingdom’s Joe McDonagh Cup campaign, which gets underway next month with a trip away to Westmeath (on the weekend of April 20/21).

Lixnaw man Conway, who inspired the green and gold to their sole win of their Division 2A campaign, was notable by his absence from the starting fifteen and and squad for Saturday’s seven-point defeat to Kildare in the Hawkfield centre-of-excellence.

Conway it emerged picked up an injury in training between rounds three and four of the National League, an injury which will likely see him miss at least the opening couple of rounds of the championship and possibly the entire competition.

“Shane Conway is a bit of doubt now for the championship, we don’t know if he’ll be back for that,” Molumphy confirmed.

“He’s a key player for us. It’s a new one [injury], he came in there and whatever way [he injured it], but you know what it would be unfortunate. He’s given it his all, he’s a real leader, but that’s it it’s up to the others now to step up.”

The potential or even likely loss of Conway for some or even all of the McDonagh Cup is a major blow to the Kingdom’s aspirations in the competition. Even with Conway in the fold those ambitions are likely to be limited simply to survival in the grade.

Kerry’s performances in the league haven’t been stellar, with Molumphy all but conceding that the Kingdom have little or no chance (despite there still being a slim technical possibly that they could make the semi-finals) of progressing in the competition after Saturday’s defeat.

“The league is parked now for us unfortunately, it’s all gearing towards championship and peaking at the right time,” he said.

“I suppose look we have eleven guys coming from the injury list who will be coming back for the championship hopefully. And next week we’ll give guys who didn’t get much game time during the league, we’ll be able to give them a shot, a chance to see what they have.”

The Kingdom have had a massive turnover of players in the last twelve months, which has led to an understandably tricky transition. That difficult transition, however, has been compounded by something of an injury crisis, with Conway joined on the injury list by ten other colleagues.

“We’ve eleven out injured, but every inter-county team has injuries,” Molumphy noted.

“You can never go and blame injuries. It’s inter-county, it’s next man up and I’d be… you hear managers talking about injuries? Forget it. What we had out there was the team representing their county, there’s no excuses.

“Somebody said to me there it’s over fourteen guys first time playing, a couple of debutants again this year. Another guy said it was the first league game they’d ever played, but you can’t afford to have that transition time, and I’m a firm believer against it [transition].

“Every man is here for a reason. There’s a lot of new guys on board. It’ll do them a world of good going into championship having played this now and they can bank that, but we had the chances there today.

“At half-time, and fair play, just chances, we didn’t take ours in the second half and fair play to Kildare they took them at a key time, taking the goal, and kind of just drove on there keeping that gap open. It’s something we have to address, our conversion rate.”

The defeat to the Lilywhites in Hawkfield on Saturday was a deflating one for the Kingdom coming off the back of an encouraging display against Meath in the previous round.

“No it wasn’t [the result we wanted],” Molumphy confirmed.

“We needed that to go forward to try and make the semi-finals. A disappointing result, just we didn’t take our scoring chances. You wouldn’t mind half-time down a point, against a four or five point wind so we were confident going in the second half.

“We’d the first three scoring chances there [at the start of the second half] and wide, wide, wide and then went up and just, I think they’d one wide or two wides, in the second half and credit to Kildare. The team that makes the least amount of mistakes normally wins and they did that.”